Professor to speak about war profiteering

Published
7:00 pm EST, Friday, February 4, 2011

FAIRFIELD

While corporations continue to profit from war, the nature of war profiteering has significantly changed in the last 25 years, according to G. Simon Harak, S.J., a Fairfield University graduate and co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization, Voices in the Wilderness.

At 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 8, Harak, the 1995 "Teacher of the Year" at the university, will deliver the 2011 Bellar-mine Lecture.

"It has been, and always will be, true that certain corporations make profit from war," said the Jesuit priest, director of Marquette Univer-sity's Center for Peacemaking. "But now, certain corporations have gained so much influence in the policy-making of the United States government, that it might be just as true to say that those corporations make war for profit."

"The Global War on Terror: Who Wins? Who Loses?" his talk, free and open to the public, will be held in the Dolan School of Business Dining Room.

After teaching ethics at Fairfield for 13 years, Harak resigned in 1999 to help found Voices in the Wilder-ness, a human rights group nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He has traveled to Iraq three times with the group. During one of his visits, he was the only American representative among 500 international participants at the Baghdad International Conference on the Sanctions. He has since then made more than 2,000 presentations on Iraq on TV, radio, and at different venues in the U.S. and abroad, and to a congress of non-governmental organizations at the United Nations.

In 2003, Harak joined the War Resisters League as its national anti-militarism coordinator, where he organized a national speakers bureau on war profiteering, and a national conference on war profiteering.

A member of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he later joined the faculty of Marquette where he teaches theological ethics. He is also the Jesuit school's director of the Center for Peacemaking.